Strategic Denial and Deception: The Twenty-First Century Challenge

Rating:
Summary: Advanced Reading for National Security Practitioner-Students
Review:

This is a really excellent collection of advanced reading on strategic denial and deception, and it makes the vital point that denial and deception are at the core of 4th generation warfare and asymmetric offense and defense strategy.

The two contributing editors are the best-qualified experts possible. Roy Godson's work in the 1980's and 1990's on intelligence requirements, carrying on today with his advanced thinking on restoring covert action and counterintelligence as well as the synergy among these and collection with analysis, makes him the premier policy-scholar in this arena. Jim Wirtz, author of the very insightful "The Tet Offensive: Intelligence Failure in War," and now chairman of the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School where very advanced work is being done on the new craft of intelligence (both human and technical, both secret and open), adds a combat practitioners perspective.

While there are some similarities among a few of the contributions, on balance each one is sufficiently unique. Two key thoughts that jumped out:

1) Most of the lessons learned come from World War II. The authors were hard-pressed to find modern examples. The one used from the Gulf War (an amphibious feint) is in my recollection false--we were planning an amphibious attack, and it was only at the last minute that CINCCENT was persuaded to do a Hail Mary end run, prompted in part by some exceptional work from the Navy's intelligence center that showed the beach obstacles in great detail.

2) Two perennial lessons learned are that policy makers do not want to hear about possible hostile denial and deception--they want to stick with their own preconceptions (which of course make denial and deception easier to accomplish against us); and second, that intelligence experts tend to be under great pressure to cook the books in favor of policy preconceptions, while also being generally unwilling to believe the enemy can deceive them or accomplish slights of hand that are undetectable.

All of the chapters are good, but two struck me as especially helpful today: J. Bowyer Bell's "Conditions Making for Success and Failure of Denial and Deception: Nonstate and Illicit Actors," and Bart Whaley & Jeffrey Busby, "Detecting Deception: Practice, Practitioners, and Theory." The latter, building on a lifetime of study that included a review of eight strategic cultures as well as the cost of major deceptions (D-Day deceptions that fixed German forces cost less than 1% of the assets and could have saved the entire force), examined 47 seven different kind of "detectives" from scientists and bank tellers to biographers and private eyes, and creates nine categories of "detectibles", concluding with the Law of Multiple Sensors, something that most stove-piped intelligence communities simply will not grasp for at least another decade.

This is both a serious work of scholarship, and a very valuable policy reader.

Rating:
Summary: Snakes on Scanners! Shields Up!
Review: Roy Godson and James J. Wirtz (Editors), Strategic Denial and Deception: The Twenty-First Century Challenge. Transaction Pub; ISBN: 0765801132; (March 2002).

This new volume signals a post Cold War revival of attention and interest in deception, a revival growing in Washington since the mid-1990s. Experiences with the deceptions of the Iraqis, Somalis, Serbs, North Koreans, various transnational terrorists, and narco-criminals have revived awareness in the United States that deception is among the time-honored techniques of asymmetrical warfare, capable of allowing the weaker, but deceptive opponent to surprise, wound, or even defeat a far stronger adversary. Attention to deception and counter-deception, focused in the 1980s on the Soviet threat, has revived to address the new post Cold War threats, what one observer called the "snakes in the grass." Attempts to bury deception inside the befuddled complexity of "information operations" are failing: deception is back, it's a problem, and people are doing something about it.
Academic conferences, research journal articles, and scholarly volumes of analysis and theory such as this one signify that deception and counter-deception, until recently buried in the classified world, limited to informal intelligence agency committees and think tank working groups, have again become quasi-respectable, if not altogether mainstream, stand-alone concerns in the American national security structure. The informal committees are becoming formally chartered, working groups turning into boxes on organizational charts, and analysts are going back to schools to catch up on theory, tactics, techniques, and procedures. Policy makers are pressed to take sides: for or against using deception; needing or rejecting the need for counter-deception. More conferences, journal articles, and volumes are on undoubtedly on the way. The participants all need to read this book.
On the bow-wave of this coming swell of deception concern is Godson and Wirtz's excellent statement of the problems of deception, its challenges to U.S. intelligence, the success and failure of deceptions by the various snakes under various conditions, and the prospects for detecting and deflecting deception. The posture they describe is wholly defensive: the snakes will deceive U.S. intelligence and the national security policy and decision makers. There is no offensive outlook on deception here, no argument that the U.S. needs a capability to cloak the employment its instruments of national security.
Like the starships of the Star Trek Federation, we do shields, deceptive cloaking is only for the Bad Guys. Brigadier General Walter Jajko's incisive commentary in this volume explains exactly why this is, and it likely not to change: the United States simply does not know how to employ deception for national security, and is effectively organized culturally, socially, traditionally, and organizationally not to learn. In the U.S. the practicing field of deception it seems has been yielded to advertising, politics, business, and other criminal enterprises.
Godson and Wirtz's chapters lay out the defensive challenge to U.S. national security. Their authors are flagship analysts and theorists of deception's problems, with a healthy leavening of reality-checking national security insiders among them: Abram Shulsky, Richards Heuer, Barton Whaley, M.R.D. Foot, J. Bowyer Bell, Lynn Hansen, Paul Rossa, James Bruce. This volume is a foundation for understanding what we are up against and what we can do about it.